Telegraph Names Brideshead Among Top TV Costume Dramas

On the occasion of ITV’s announcement of a new TV adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the Daily Telegraph has produced an album from what its fashion editors consider the most sumptuous costume dramas of all time. Granada’s 1981 production of Brideshead Revisited is the earliest drama on the list. The Telegraph in this case is focused on costume over drama and includes a still of Diana Quick (who played Julia Flyte) wearing what it describes as “a cloche hat with a cream dropped waist dress.” Others included in the album of 20 range from three earlier adaptations of Jane Austen novels to the more recent Jackie, Mad Men and Game of Thrones.

In the National Geographic magazine, another chapter in the round-the-world walk of Paul Salopek (“Out of Eden Walk: Into Eden”) focuses on the plant life of Kyrgyzstan. As he describes various wild flowers, Salopek is reminded of a passage from Evelyn Waugh:

As I hike out of Kyrgyzstan, traversing the lush valleys of the Alai Mountains bound for the neighboring state of Tajikistan, I rack my brain to recall the names of the constellations of flowers that, mile upon mile, I wade through: Poppies. Vetches. Bedstraws. St. John’s wort. Naturally I lifted these delightful names from the British press.

It is reassuring to know—in these anarchic, shark-pool, digital media days—that English newspapers still not only employ “gardening correspondents” but also send them on far-flung assignment to remotest Kyrgyzstan to botanize, on horseback, for readers. (“Under hot sun we trot ever higher past wild white roses and rocks crammed with saxifrage and campanulas.”) It is no accident that Evelyn Waugh chose a mild-mannered nature writer as his foil in the novel Scoop, his classic satire of war correspondence. (“Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole,” writes his garden-columnist hero, who is shipped off to an African war zone by mistake.)

Finally, an unnamed Twitter user has set up a page for posting favorite quotations from the works of Evelyn Waugh. Here’s a link provided by one of our readers: Evelyn Waugh (@waughquotes) | Twitter